Luisa Morgan ’26 joins 28 other Reedies who have won the award, which financially supports students who show promise in becoming the next generation of research leaders.
By Cara Nixon
May 9, 2025
By that morning, Luisa Morgan ’26 had already accepted she wasn’t going to get it. She felt disappointed, sitting in a workshop with Professor Shivani Ahuja’s lab, as the time came and went for the email to arrive.
But then Nicole Li ’25, last year’s winner of the Goldwater Scholarship, texted her: “Check your email!” Luisa, feeling bummed out, replied: “I did.” Nicole encouraged her to check it again. When Luisa opened her spam folder as a last resort, she found the email waiting for her—she’d won the Goldwater Scholarship after all.
“I screamed in the chem lounge,” Luisa recalls. “I ran into the lab and showed Shivani—she was my letter writer and my research adviser for the application, and I wrote my significant experience essay on how much her mentorship meant to me. She was so happy.”
The is a prestigious award that financially supports college sophomores and juniors who show exceptional promise of becoming the next generation of research leaders in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics in the United States. Luisa, a biochemistry and molecular biology junior, is the 29th Reedie to receive the award.
From a young age, Luisa was fascinated with disease. “But in a little kid way,” she says, “where you’re not thinking too hard about it.” Then when she came to college, she started to wonder why disease happened. Sitting in biology classes, she learned much of it was connected to proteins, which led her down the research road she’s still on today.
She’s assisted in the Chácon Lab, conducted independent research in the Campillo-Alvarado Lab, and worked as a B-BRITE intern for Oregon Health & Sciences University, but Luisa has spent much of her time in Ahuja’s lab, researching the bacterial regulation of metals, specifically manganese.
“If you can determine a protein's structure, you can imply its function and lead to educated guesses on how these systems are interacting,” Luisa explains. “And if you understand the system, you can design appropriate interventions. So the end goal is to target antibiotic resistance.”
Luisa plans to focus her thesis on this topic, though the specific protein she’ll be looking at is to be determined. She hopes to continue working with Ahuja, whose mentorship Luisa says she’s eternally grateful for.
“She is genuinely one of the kindest people I’ve ever met in my life,” Luisa says. “She took a chance on me, and she really did ‘raise’ me as a scientist. She built my foundation entirely and showed me where I want to go and what I want to do, and is giving me the tools to get there.”
What she wants to do, someday, is pursue an MD/PhD in biochemistry with a focus on structural biology and structure-based drug discovery. The Goldwater will help her on the path to get there. Ahuja says: "Luisa is very hardworking, and I never had any doubts that she would be successful. Very well deserved!"